1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to displaying information on a display screen, and more particularly to a web-browsing navigational tool for handheld computerized devices.
2. Related Art
With the advent of the Internet, it is increasingly common to display information, particularly Internet web pages, with connected, limited devices (“CLD's”) that are highly portable, and therefore limited in size and computational power. Typical examples of CLD's include small, handheld computerized devices such as a personal digital assistant (“PDA”) with or without built-in communication function, cellular telephone, and two-way pagers. Due to size and battery power constraints, the processor included in a CLD typically provides less computational power than a desktop computer, and therefore has limited resources for performing tasks such as processing instructions, and displaying information. Of course, the display screen for a CLD is typically smaller than the size of a desktop computer display screen. Therefore there is an increasing need to efficiently utilize the limited resources available to a CLD. Additionally, it may be desirable to provide a web-browsing tool for the small sized display screen of a CLD to navigate and display information efficiently in response to user inputs.
Referring to FIG. 1, information 100 is shown, displayed in a single view, generated by a conventional web browser for a desktop display screen 105. According to prior art, a display screen 110, for a CLD 190, is also shown, displaying a portion 112 of information 100 displayed on display screen 105. Horizontal scroll bar 115 and vertical scroll bar 120 are used to control the relative position of display screen 110 within information 100. While it is possible to view all of information 100 on display screen 110 by moving small display screen 110 around within information 100, this arrangement is nevertheless problematic. For example, it may be difficult to correlate a first piece of information 100 displayed with in display screen 110 in a first position with another piece of information 100 located several rows and/or columns away that is displayed with in display screen 110 in a second position.
The World Wide Web Consortium (“W3C”) has developed standards for the world wide web (“WWW”) that promote further evolution of the WWW and ensure interoperability. W3C standards such as Extensible Markup Language (“XML”), Extensible Stylesheet Language (“XSL”) and XSL transformations (“XSLT”) are well known for generating information displayed by a browser.
As stated above, it is common to display information, such as information 100, in a web page format. Referring to FIG. 2, aspects of such formatting are illustrated, according to prior art. As shown in FIG. 2, an XSLT processor 220 adds styling information in the form of an XSLT style sheet file 230 to an XML source document 210, transforming source document 210 into a resulting HTML document 240. Alternatively, the resulting document 240 may be prepared by using other presentation-oriented formats such as XHTML, PDF or scalable vector graphics (“SVG”). Although referred to as a “processor”, XSLT processor 220 is a software program.
From the above it should be appreciated that there is an increasing need to format information for presentation on a device having a limited display size, and that it is particularly useful to do so in a manner that conforms to browser-related standards.